Marxist IQ: Marxism on war and peace

This is Memorial Day weekend. Let us pay real homage to both the military and civilian casualties of war by dedicating this Marxist IQ to understanding the causes of war and the struggle for a genuine peace.

1. At the time of the Franco Prussian War, the policy of Karl Marx and the First International was:

a. Support Bismarck’s Prussia against Napoleon III’s evil empire;
b. Support a pacifist policy against all wars;
c. Call for immediate revolution by French and Prussian workers;
d. Call for French and Prussian workers to fight to end the war and make a peace without annexations.

2. During the American Civil War, the policy of Karl Marx and the First International was to:

a. Call for Southern and Northern Workers to rise up and overthrow their rulers;
b. Say that there was no difference between Northern Capitalists and Southern Slaveholders since both were exploiters and oppressors;
c. Support the Union and the Lincoln government as advancing a democratic revolution which remove the major barrier to the organization of the working class and the establishing of socialism;
d. Refuse to support the Lincoln government until it demanded the abolition of slavery.

3. At the outbreak of WWI in August, 1914, two socialist parties among the powers who declared war opposed the war. Those parties were:

a. The Russian Mensheviks and the British Laborites;
b. The Russian Social Revolutionaries and the German Social Democrats;
c. The Russian Bolsheviks and the Serbian Socialists;
d. The Russian Kadets(Constitutional Democrats) and the French Socialists.

4. Vladimir Lenin defined World War I as:

a. A war to make the world safe for democracy by establishing a League of Nations;
b. An imperialist war in which both sides fought to redivide the world;
c. A war to free the colonial peoples from their oppressors;
d. A war for Russia to protect its Slavic brothers.

5. As the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the USSR escalated in the 1950s, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said:

a. That a nuclear war could be won with a “Star Wars” defense;
b. That the only way to prevent a nuclear war was by “massive retaliation and “mutually assured destruction” (MAD);
c. That it was the only war in history where “the survivors would envy the dead;”
d. That “We (the Soviet Union) will bury you (The United States).”

6. While North Korea today has become the center of global fears concerning nuclear war, most Americans are unaware that:

a. General Douglas MacArthur requested the use a large number of atomic bombs to secure victory;
b. Air Force General Curtis Lemay later boasted that hat the 20% of the North Korean population was killed;
c. At estimated three million Koreans were killed in the Korean War(1950-1953);
d. All of the above.

Author

The Communist Party USA is a working class organization founded in 1919 in Chicago, IL.

The Communist Party stands for the interests of the American working class and the American people. It stands for our interests in both the present and the future. Solidarity with workers of other countries is also part of our work. We work in coalition with the labor movement, the peace movement, the student movement, organizations fighting for equality and social justice, the environmental movement, immigrants rights groups and the health care for all campaign.

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We are rooted in our country's revolutionary history and its struggles for democracy. We call for "Bill of Rights" socialism, guaranteeing full individual freedoms.

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